A few hardy England supporters camp in a fanzone in Kircha near Donetsk before Monday’s game against France. Photograph: Charles Platiau/Reuters

High wire fences, guards in army fatigues and a stretch of scrubland lodged into the armpit of a multi-lane motorway intersection: first glimpses of the widely derided accommodation laid on for England football supporters just south of the cheerfully belching industrial sprawl of Donetsk are scarcely promising.

England will play France in their opening match at Euro 2012 on Monday in the magnificent glass and steel flying saucer that is Donetsk's central Donbass arena, Europe's most thrillingly hi-tech stadium and an emblem of carbon-funded regional ambition in this frontier city, just 40 miles from the border with Russia.

And while Donetsk's 50,000-capacity stadium is likely to be abuzz with the new-money royalty of Ukraine's coal capital, for the first time at a modern football championship England's fans are currently in danger of failing to take up their ticket allocation. The usual mass of hardy sport tourists has so far failed to materialise in Europe's largest and easternmost country.

Those who are here are a rather rag-tag bunch given England's usual mob-handed presence on such occasions.

But then Donetsk is the most distant place England's footballers have been required to visit over the 52 years of their habitually fraught pursuit of European football glory. The traveller to this distant industrial city arrives out of a vast, flat, green land dimpled with reservoirs and smoking refineries. If Ukraine translates as "land on the edge", Donetsk is the edge of the edge, a place that sprouted up haphazardly around the coal deposits first mined by the itinerant Welsh entrepreneur John Hughes 140 years ago.

In the Donetsk Camping Park 2012, there are perhaps 200 England fans scattered around the periphery of the parched, baking-hot compound. Slabs have replaced the anticipated mud bath, and beer tents have mushroomed up around a vast, unshaded central square, on which a gaggle of shirtless Englishmen in baggy shorts kick a ball around.

The main gate is tended by an unsmiling military guard, but carries the bizarre message: "It was cool being with you guys! Come back soon! I love you guys." And with its piped house music and sweaty beer tents, the whole place has the air of a kind of Soviet-era Magaluf constructed in the yard of an abandoned rural cement plant.

Phil, Pete and Justin from Sheffield have pitched their tents on the fringes of a field of crops, which is simultaneously being farmed by a group of local men. "It's not hard to get over that fence if you fancy a rob," they say, indicating the barrier that separates their camping pitch from the highway. "But we were expecting worse to be honest, there were those stories in the paper, but that's a load of shite. It's not that bad. At least it's not raining. And the beer's cheap."

Chris, Rich and Raj have travelled from Canada to support England and paid about £100 per night for a three-man berth. "It's about what we expected," they shrug, eagerly producing a photo of their rudimentary bathroom. "We heard the stories but there weren't any hotels at all in Donetsk, they just all went. That's why we're here. It could be better for sure. I have no idea how we're going to get into town."

The official Euro 2012 guide to the city mentions rather hopefully the "strangely attractive slag-heaps" that loom like giant worm casts around a surprisingly green city where the air still at times carries a tang of something ferrous.

And even Uefa's schmaltzy corporate carnival with its sponsored fan zones and fan parks could never take the edge off what is a cowboy-ish town, a place where oligarch-flash sits side by side with a proud Stakhanovite history. (A central statue of a miner holding aloft in reverence a lump of coal is the city's defining image.) Donetsk is an unusual host in other ways. Never before at Europe's grandest footballing jamboree have England supporters been asked to travel to a city that frankly doesn't care much if they come back again.

The process of staging tournament matches is usually bound up in municipal self-promotion, a wooing of tourist and professional trade. But when the Uefa president, Michel Platini, suggested Donetsk reduce its hotel prices or otherwise England fans wouldn't return, the response was: so be it. They're not coming back anyway. Instead, England are here in essence because Rinat Akhmetov, a local oligarch-overlord, has made it unavoidable. Akhmetov bankrolled the Donbass arena.

He is not just a rich man, but a broker of influence, and the presence of Europe's footballing nations here is a huge feather in the cap of Donetsk's economic elite, plus a grand statement of regional power for a city that does not need to look to the tourist trade for its income, but instead finds it in the ground beneath its feet.

At the end of which, England's depleted travelling campers find themselves in an unlikely scrubland enclosure to the south of Ukraine's main eastern city that has a tang of hospitable back-to-basics necessity.

England will be back in Donetsk on 19 June to face Ukraine, a match that will probably decide which nation progresses to the knockout stages of a tournament that has already shone unaccustomed light on Ukraine's coal capital, an ambitious new staging point on Europe's football map.